What are your thoughts of the 2012 scenario

painkiller64

Avoid A Void
Just would like to see what everyone thinks of this.. I cant say if it will happen or not or even if i believe that it will or not. I am kind of at a stand still here. I have read so much about it and watched so many shows that my brain is still processing it all.
 
(For those not familiar with that date... Dec. 21, 2012 is when the Mayan calendar ends and is thought to signify that a major cataclysm will take place. To borrow a phrase from the movie Deep Impact, it is expect that that an ELE, End-Of-Life Event, will be taking place.)

Honestly, I think 2012 will come again as any other US election year. Unless, of course, it is Palin winning the election that will trigger the great cataclysm. ;)

Other dates have been re-occurring in doomsday predictions and so far they have all come and gone. Heck, we aren't even supposed to be alive right now.... the Y2K bugs were supposed to have set of nuclear bombs all over the world.
 
Given that the many "end of the world" predictions in various faiths have had a really impressive 100% record (of being wrong), I am baffled as to why anyone should give a moment's thought to them.

Mind you, Kevin could be right about Sarah Palin - cause for concern!
 
something to be considered (possibly); Christian (and Muslim) eschatology indicate an end to this current age within the few years, as well as various ecology groups.
 
I think you're putting two very different things together.

Some people fear that our constant meddling with our planet in general (and its atmosphere in particular) is going to have devastating consequences for our civilisation within this century. They may well be right, but it won't be "the end of the world". Humanity will continue to survive (save in the most extreme scenarios) and the planet will carry on happily regardless.

A religious belief in "the end of the world" has no objective rationale behind it, it's just superstition.
 
so tell me, why does the mayan calender, the chinese and pretty much every other societies calender end on or around december 2012. i am not trying to sound inept here but culture does show us through the many thousands of years that all believe in one thing, that this time that we are coming up on is special for some reason. as quoted on the history channel once that there is no way thousands of years ago that all these cultures could have gotten together and agreed upon this one specific date for this event.

i dont particurally think that this will be a ELE event but who knows what will happen, maybe the world will reverse itself or the poles will shift. maybe they will find a stargate or warp drive. maybe klingon women are purely guresome above the neck. LOL. you never know what will happen.
 
From: Maya calendar - Wikipedia

The Mesoamerican Long Count calendar forms the basis for a New Age belief, first forecast by José Argüelles, that a cataclysm will take place on or about December 21, 2012, a forecast that mainstream Mayanist scholars consider a misinterpretation, yet is commonly referenced in pop-culture media as the 2012 problem.

"For the ancient Maya, it was a huge celebration to make it to the end of a whole cycle," says Sandra Noble, executive director of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc. in Crystal River, Florida. To render December 21, 2012, as a doomsday or moment of cosmic shifting, she says, is "a complete fabrication and a chance for a lot of people to cash in."
 
I think you're putting two very different things together.

Some people fear that our constant meddling with our planet in general (and its atmosphere in particular) is going to have devastating consequences for our civilisation within this century. They may well be right, but it won't be "the end of the world". Humanity will continue to survive (save in the most extreme scenarios) and the planet will carry on happily regardless.

A religious belief in "the end of the world" has no objective rationale behind it, it's just superstition.

two different things to be sure; consider the coincidence (if there is one!) and I would hesitate to dismiss religion as 'just superstition'. I've witnessed some amazing personal changes in people who have 'gotten religion'.
 
Sandra Noble, executive director of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc. in Crystal River, Florida. To render December 21, 2012, as a doomsday or moment of cosmic shifting, she says, is "a complete fabrication and a chance for a lot of people to cash in.


Like she has anyway of knowing whether or not it's a moment of "cosmic shifting" or what that would signify. Speaking of somebody cashing in on MesoAmerica herself, of course.

Let me suggest that you take a peek at the work of Terrence McKenna. Not the psychedelic plants stuff, the "Time Zero" program and resultant time mapping.

Briefly, it's a theory of time drawn out of mathematical permutations of the I Ching--itself a document based on time, on change (which is what time is made of, actually). Jung's idea that it dealt with "syncronicity" is a very simple and basic concept of what this whole study is all about, and suggests a document based on time.

What the Time Zero business graphs, essentially, is "novelty". Again, change, new ocurrence. It plots a period of decreasing novelty--an entropy of time. And charts the increase of novelty over the peaks and valleys of a "time wave". The current wave approaches infinity on Dec. 12, 2001.

Now there are many ways of discounting this, especially without familiarizing one's self with the material. (I'm continually astounded at how many people in forums devoted to speculative fiction cite science--what they got taught--to attempt to rule out speculation.)

But this thread asked for thoughts on the subject, and there is thinking on it that goes way beyond and Nostradamus or bearded nut on the street with an end is nigh sign.

Those interested can start with an overview of Time Zero here.

Time Zero was developed almost two decades ago, indepently of the Maya Calendar thing. There is a blog that shows some of the ties between them here.




"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horato, than are dreamt of in your philosophy" Hamlet
 
One thing you learn pretty quick in both higher physics and psychelia is that the concept of time most people carry around with them is extremely primitive. It's not a flowing river, or a stack of blocks where each second rests on the one before and scales to eternity.

Just as the simple analogy of electricity being like a pile full of marbles with one coming out the far end each time one is inserted in the near end begs the question of causality (does electricity REALLY flow from the red anode to the blue one? Or is it pulled there?) and gets a lot more complicated in a hurry once it becomes electronics and later the blend of electronics with information, time doesn't quite work like that. Just as lightning doesn't really jump from a cloud to the earth, but rather the reverse--and involves an exchange of particles.

The idea that if flows in waves and radiates in ripples isn't that hard to get. The idea that it is not "pushed forward" by the past, but "pulled" by the future is not exotic--I think I first ran across it in college physics in the late sixties--but is in no way part of our general conception of time.
The idea of non-causal synchronicity--hardly that exotic in physics studies of other phenemena--is in itself a major monkey wrench in the mechanistic concept of time.

People who are quite comfortable with the idea that matter and time are interdependent, co-created, and as transferable as matter and energy turned out to be after centuries of teachers said they weren't--and with the concept of the material universe in an accelerating expansion--have little to conceptualize when you ask them, "Well, gee, is it possible that time is expanding at an accelerated rate?"

Just for one example to think about a little.
 
PS There is another time theory based on I Ching and Tao that's interesting: the series of mongraphs by Michio Kushi. Kushi is the second most famous macrobiotic thinker, outside of macrobiotics founder George Ohsawa: macrobiotics is not a diet, it's a philosphy of the nature of reality. And fairly invested in laboratory proofs and experiments.

One of his cooler observations (or machinations or whatever) is that time kind of rotates through several periods--call them "houses" or "signs" or "epochs" or whatever you want--and that each time it goes around it happens three times faster.

He plots history against that spiral and if you start it at the right place it produces some striking similarities of world events as the timeline spirals through through various sectors.

Needless to say a spiral like that hits a zero point. I wish to hell I had those books around to see when he said we reach the zero point. But not long after the millenium, as I recall.
 
Like she has anyway of knowing whether or not it's a moment of "cosmic shifting" or what that would signify.
And you do?

Let me suggest that you take a peek at the work of Terrence McKenna. Not the psychedelic plants stuff, the "Time Zero" program and resultant time mapping.
I have. As far as I can see, his theories were very much informed by psychedelic plants:

"McKenna did not attempt to defend his hypotheses through rigorous scientific evidence; he consciously self-identified as a type of shaman, or ethnobotanist. McKenna and his followers view his theories as speculation that is at a minimum scientifically feasible and arguably gifted by special knowledge due to psychedelic plants." (Terence McKenna - Wikipedia)​

That's enough for me. The moment that a paper providing objective evidence for his claims gets accepted by a reputable science journal, I will take notice. Until then, he just another of the vast multitude of BS merchants with which humanity is constantly plagued.
 
And you do?
I've got some ideas on the subject, but I'm not going on record denyinhg something I don't understand, am I? If you don't see the difference there and were just mindless popping off, fine.
If you want an explanation, let me know.

As far as I can see,

Well. yeah, that is kind of the statute of limitations, isn't it?

I must also point out that the capacity of the human mind for self-delusion seems to be almost limitless.
Yeah, I've noticed that. Note my previous quote for an idea on how those limits can operate. But I already commented on that, in the quote below

I'm continually astounded at how many people in forums devoted to speculative fiction cite science--what they got taught--to attempt to rule out speculation
 
There is speculation for the purposes of entertainment (i.e. fiction) - which is fine.

There is speculation based on some hard evidence (e.g. trying to account for observed phenomena in a rational way) - also fine.

Then there is speculation based on nothing more than old myths or accidents of numerology - which is worthless.
 
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